The second was pagan art which satisfies itself that in expressing the perfection of humanity, it unfolds divinity. The third era of Christian art, conscious that the divine lies beyond the human, fails in aspiring to express infinitude.
Tracing one of these periods from its rise, how truly this similitude of the dawn of day is carried out. See at the first streak of light how dim, stiff, and soulless all things appear! Trees and objects bear precisely the relation to their own appearance in broad daylight as the wooden Madonnas of the Byzantine school do to those of Raphael.
Next, when the sun—the true light—first appears, how it bathes the sea and the hills in an ethereal glory not their own! What fair liquid tints of blue, and rose, and glorious gold! This period which, in art, began with Giotto and ended with Botticelli, culminated in Fra Angelico, who flooded the world of painting with a heavenly spiritualism not material, and gave his dreams of heaven the colours of the first pure rays of sunshine.
But as the sun rises, nature takes her real tints gradually. We see every thing in its own colour; the gold and the rose has faded away with the truer light, and a stern realism takes its place. The human form must be expressed, in all its solidity and truth, not only in its outward semblance, but the hidden soul must be seen through the veil of flesh. And in this lies the reason of the decline; only to a few great masters it was given to reveal spirituality in humanity—the others could only emulate form and colour, and failed.
It is impossible to contemplate art apart from religion; as truly as the celestial sun is the revealer of form, so surely is the heavenly light of religion the first inspirer of art.
Where would the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Etruscan paintings and sculptures have been but for the veneration of the mystic gods of the dead, which both prompted and preserved them?
What would Greek sculpture have been without the deified personifications of the mysterious powers of nature which inspired it? and it is the fact of the pagan religion being both sensuous and realistic which explains the perfection of Greek art. The highest ideal being so low as not to soar beyond the greatest perfection of humanity, was thus within the grasp of the artist to express. Given a manly figure with the fullest development of strength; a female one showing the greatest perfection of form; and a noble man whose features express dignity and mental power;—the ideal of a Hercules, a Venus, and a Jupiter is fully expressed, and the pagan mind satisfied. The spirit of admirers was moved more by beauty of form than by its hidden significance. In the great Venus, one recognises the woman before feeling the goddess.
As with their sculpture, without doubt it was also with painting. Mr. Symonds, in his Renaissance of the Fine Arts, speaks of the Greek revival as entirely an age of sculpture; but the solitary glance into the more perishable art of painting among the Greeks, to be seen at Cortona, reveals the exquisite perfection to which this branch was also brought. It is a painting in encaustic, and has been used as a door for his oven by the contadino who dug it up—yet it remains a marvel of genius. The subject is a female head—a muse, or perhaps only a portrait; the delicacy and mellowness of the flesh tints equal those of Raphael or Leonardo, and a lock of hair lying across her breast is so exquisitely painted that it seems to move with her breath. The features are of the large-eyed regular Greek type, womanly dignity is in every line, but it is an essentially pagan face—the Christian soul has never dawned in those eyes! With this before us, we cannot doubt that Greek art found its expression as much in colour as in form and that the same religion inspired both.
In an equal degree Renaissance Art has its roots in Christianity; but the religion is deeper and greater, and has left art behind.
The early Christians must have felt this when they expressed everything in symbols, for these are merely suggestive, and allow the imagination full play around and beyond them; they are mere stepping-stones to the ideal which exists but is as yet inexpressible.